Michael Lesch

Michael Lesch was an American physician and medical educator who helped identify an important genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability and self-mutilation. This disease is now known as the Lesch–Nyhan syndrome. In the mid-1960s when the syndrome was discovered, Lesch was a research associate working at the Laboratory of General and Comparative Biochemistry at the NIH National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. William Nyhan, a pediatrician and biochemical geneticist, was his mentor. Lesch was 30 years old when he discovered the disease.